Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/153

 population to make a holocaust of the national places of worship, and to stone, slaughter, and banish their priests. If Japan endured these outrages for a time, it was because her strength of national self-assertion was paralysed by division. The central administration had no power to prescribe a uniform policy to the multitude of irresponsible and semi-independent principalities into which the country was divided, and in the rival ambitions of the various territorial magnates whose cause the missionary promoted with arms and gold, he found temporary safety and patronage. The integration of the Empire, first under Hideyoshi, subsequently and more completely under Iyeyasu, was the signal for recourse to measures which, were they embodied in a chapter of contemporary Occidental history, would not have seemed either incongruous or abnormal.

There is no occasion to describe in detail the struggle that ensued between religious fanaticism and the exterminating zeal of officials who believed themselves to be obeying the highest instincts of patriotic statecraft. The story has already occupied many pens. Terrible things were done, things worthy of Torquemada and Ximenes, and the long tragedy culminated in a rebellion which involved the death of from thirty to forty thousand Christians and the final expulsion of the Portuguese from Japan. This rebellion—celebrated in history as the "Shimabara Revolt"—was brought to a close in the spring